All Ethereum Security Tools Built by ConsenSys Diligence

March 28, 2019 by Bernhard Mueller

ConsenSys Diligence is a security-focused group of 30+ Ethereum engineers, auditors and researchers distributed all over the world. We have a tradition of building security tools for ourselves and the Ethereum community. Because our time is precious, we focus on creating polished, highly usable tools that are truly helpful to auditors and smart contract developers. This article introduces some of the highlights.

Visual Auditors for Solidity and Vyper

Written by Martin Ortner a.k.a. tintinweb, Solidity Visual Auditor is a Visual Studio Code extension created to make the life of smart contract auditors easier. It provides security-aware syntax and semantic highlighting, a detailed class outline and advanced Solidity code insights to Visual Studio Code users. Comprehensive security analysis functionality will be added soon. A Vyper version is also available.

Surya

Auditing complex smart contract systems may cause your head to explode. Surya by Goncalo Sá aids auditors in understanding and visualizing Solidity smart contracts. It provides information about the contracts’ structure and generates call graphs and inheritance graphs. It also supports querying the function call graph in multiple ways to aid in the manual inspection of contracts.

Surya can produce a DOT-formatted graph of the inheritance tree.

Mythril

The Swiss Army Knife of smart contract security hardly needs an introduction. On the off chance that you haven’t heard of it, Mythril is a disassembler, hacking tool and security analyzer that uses symbolic analysis and taint analysis to detect a variety of security vulnerabilities. It works with Solidity code and raw EVM bytecode, eWASM support is coming soon.

Don’t accidentally kill it!

Mythril’s little brother, Scrooge McEtherface, takes things a little further by automatically exploiting the detected issues. Only every use this in a test environment!

You just accidentally stole 4 ETH.

Karl

Karl by Daniel Luca is a monitor for smart contracts that checks for security vulnerabilities using the Mythril detection engine. It can be used to monitor the Ethereum blockchain for newly deployed vulnerable smart contracts in real-time. It eliminates false positives by running candidate contracts in a virtual copy of the blockchain. Trust us, Karl discovers a lot of interesting gems every day.

Karl scrapes every new block for contract creating transactions and logs vulnerabilities.

MythX

The MythX security analysis service is our crown jewel, and yes, we’re eventually going to introduce a paid version with extra features. Why? Because at the end of the day we need to find a sustainable business model (however the MythX organization will be very different from a legacy business, you can stake your ETH on that).

PythX is a Python library that aims to provide an easy-to-use interface to MythX. Its goal is to turbocharge tool development and make it easy to deal with even complex use cases.

A fully-featured JavaScript library named mythxjs is also in the works. For now, we’re offering barebones JavaScript language binding with armlet.

If you are a tool developer of entrepreneurial spirit you should chat with the team on the MythX community Discord.

Panvala

Panvala is another ambitious project by Diligence. Created by Diligence’s resident token genius Niran Babalola, it’s not a tool, but a crypto-economic game with the goal of making Ethereum safer. In Panvala, smart contracts developers can stake tokens to get get a Panvala mark and will lose the tokens if security issues are found. Ethereum wallets like MetaMask can display Panvala marks directly in the user interface.

Panvala connects grant funders, corporate open source projects and volunteers with a token that gives them all a shared incentive to find sustainable funding together. Panvala Token Grants are issued to reward work that makes Ethereum safer. Join the Panvala Telegram channel if you’d like to get involved.